Shabazz Palaces: Black Up

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The first hip-hop album on Seattle’s Sub Pop is very strange indeed: an eerie,
futuristic mood piece that has none of the clichés modern hip-hop has fallen
into. First, the members of Shabazz Palaces remain incognito, which is
hardly typical of the genre. Second, nothing about Black Up, from its
cut-up string samples on Are You ... Can You ... Were You? to the
unsettling sound of a girl’s backwards voice on An Echo from the
Hosts that Profess Infinitum sounds like it has been done before. Raps
about the emptiness of entertainment culture further ensure that this won’t
be heard on